Listen, I don't want to derail the thread, but I'm not gonna stand by while some put forth the cockamamie notion that butter pecan ice cream is even fit for human consumption, let alone the best flavor of ice cream. I have at least that much integrity!
I don't see it as happening in discrete, easily described chunks. I see it as complicated and nuanced. Messy, too, in the sense that the response is not entirely up to me.
I don't play in a lot of games where this happens so overtly; the games I play tend to leave a lot of the characterization open, and we determine it through play, and then examine it and see if it matches what we thought going in, or if we've learned something new about a character. I don't think such mechanics are necessary, or that ever game needs them....but they do seem to kind of map to human emotion pretty well in regards to how we don't always have control of how we feel.